June 22, 2009:
Turkey has given NATO permission to station four AWACS aircraft at an airbase in western Turkey. This will make it possible to keep an AWACs in the air over Afghanistan 24/7 (or as close to that as they can). Afghanistan has never had a nationwide air-traffic control system. That was largely because there was never enough aircraft flying around to justify it. As the economy keeps growing, and more U.S. and NATO transports and warplanes are out and about, air traffic control has become a growing problem. All those radar blocking hills and high mountains don't help either. So NATO decided to bring in some of their AWACS (which don't get much work since the end of the Cold War) and play aerial traffic cop over Afghanistan. The AWACs can also keep track of any unscheduled air service being used for the drug gangs or the Taliban, or whoever. NATO will send 300 aircrew and ground support to Turkey as well. The AWACS radar can track over a hundred aircraft, within a 400 kilometers radius.

Christmas is around the corner. StrategyPage needs your help to make it a merry one for our content elves. Because of falling ad revenues and the owners of the site wanting you to have a good experience, the content elves may recieve no gifts from Santa Dunnigan.

What can you do to help the content elves have a merry Christmas? There are three possibilities:

Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.

You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage. A contribution is not a donation that you can deduct at tax time, but a form of crowdfunding. We store none of your information when you contribute..